Designing a social network survey for cancer care coordination

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the use of social network analytics for investigating the effect of aggregate complexity on health care coordination for people with cancer. Here, we highlight the social networks data collection procedures, its benefits and limitations, and measures of relational data specific to aggregate complexity. Firstly, we suggest that collection and analysis of relational and attribute data offer richer insights to the health care coordination experience of cancer patients. Secondly, drawing from theoretical and methodological strength of previous social network studies conducted in health care, we describe the phases of design undertaken to develop our data collection instrument as well as challenges and solutions associated with the design phases. Thirdly, we discuss the sampling aspect of the study in the context of cancer patients at the Sydney Cancer Centre, New South Wales (NSW), Australia along with results and implications from our pre-pilot study. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.